Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Last year, Manny Acta made a splash by dropping Grady Sizemore to second in the batting order. This year, he's considering moving him back to leadoff. Is either the right move? And how should the rest of the lineup look?

The Book, one of the best sabermetric books you can find, did extensive work on lineup construction. Their main conclusion was that lineup order didn't matter too much, but it can be optimized for marginal gains. The Book's findings are summarized very well in this Beyond the Boxscore post.

To get the stats for Cleveland's upcoming season, I used the Cairo Projections, which are described (and available for download) here. The nice thing about version 0.5 of this years Cairos is that they include lefty/righty splits. It uses wOBA, which is decribed in detail in the new Frangraphs library. As you can see, wOBA is scaled to be comparable to batting average, with a .321 wOBA being the league average in 2010.

First, here's how the Indians lineup should look against lefties. I took the top nine players in terms of wOBA against lefties, and fortunately things worked out nicely in the field.

order

name

pos

wOBA

1

Shin-Soo Choo

RF

.343

2

Matt LaPorta

1B

.351

3

Shelley Duncan

LF

.332

4

Carlos Santana

C

.346

5

Austin Kearns

CF

.342

6

Jayson Nix

3B

.327

7

Asdrubal Cabrera

SS

.326

8

Travis Hafner

DH

.326

9

Jason Donald

2B

.325

The glaring omission, of course, is Grady Sizemore. Cairo projects Sizemore to have a wOBA of only .309 against lefties. But if you insist on playing him (both in the name of fan interest, and so Kearns doesn't have to play center), you can remove Hafner from the lineup, DH Duncan, and move Donald up to eighth with Grady batting ninth.

Some other items of note:

Everyone in this lineup is projected to hit above a .321 wOBA. That's nice, but .321 was the average in 2010 against all pitchers. The average against lefties in 2011 may be higher or lower.

Indians fans should be especially pleased to see such a nice number for Matt LaPorta, especially after his struggles at the plate these past few years.

LaPorta and Santana have very similar numbers, but Santana has a slight edge in power, giving him the fourth spot over LaPorta. While Choo also has very good power, his on base percentage is just too good to put anywhere but first.

Now, the lineup against righthanders. Unfortunately I wasn't able to take just the best nine hitters this time. Michael Brantley and Travis Buck both rated ahead of Jack Hannahan. Brantley, Buck, and Duncan all rated ahead of Nix and Donald as well. But somebody has to play second and third base.

order

name

pos

wOBA

1

Shin-Soo Choo

RF

.390

2

Carlos Santana

C

.359

3

Matt LaPorta

1B

.332

4

Grady Sizemore

CF

.363

5

Travis Hafner

DH

.342

6

Austin Kearns

LF

.322

7

Asdrubal Cabrera

SS

.318

8

Jack Hannahan

3B

.309

9

Jayson Nix

2B

.307

If you don't think Jack Hannahan is going to break camp with the Tribe, feel free to move Nix up a spot in the order and plug Jason Donald's .303 wOBA into the nine hole.

Notes on this lineup:

Choo blew everyone away in both on base percentage and slugging. But I chose to hit him leadoff, just to give our best hitter as many at bats as possible.

Believe it or not, Sizemore is expected to have better slugging numbers than Santana, and Santana better on base numbers than Sizemore. That's why Grady is hitting fourth and Carlos second.

Cabrera, Nix, and Hannahan/Donald will need to be good with the glove to make up for their below-average projections. Other than that, though, this isn't too bad a lineup.

Finally, for those interested, here are the numbers for a few key players who failed to crack either lineup:

Friday, January 14, 2011

We had a total of five voters this year, including the carryover. The threshold of three votes gave us four inductees this year.

Dave (4 votes): "Mr. Best Man" is seen here with 2010 inductee Klondike.

Knute Rockne (4 votes): "One loss is good for the soul. Too many losses is not good for the coach." Rock only lost 12 games in 13 years, and put Notre Dame (the football program and the school) on the map in the process.

F-Bomb (3 votes): Ooh, multimedia.

Randy Waldrum (3 votes): Coach Waldrum has been receiving votes ever since the Hall of Fame started, but his second National Championship at ND finally put him over the top.

The also-rans. Remember that the multiple vote-getters will receive one carryover vote next year.

Name

Votes

Comment

Cleveland

2

One of the best cities!

JL

2

for his epic performance at Pete's bachelor party

Kanka's Dad

2

Pete

2

Yonto

2

Anyone not named Rafael Palmeiro

1

Ellie the Dog

1

for still being alive

George Hatton

1

Joe Posnanski

1

Kanka

1

Yes, I think you should go in again like a player who later becomes a coach

Kirk Cameron

1

for reassuring us these are not the end times

Leprechauns

1

Manti Te'o

1

because he's a bad man

Muffett McGraw

1

Nachos

1

Notre Dame

1

The whole university

Pete's Dad

1

for traveling to Pete's bachelor party and spending the weekend with us idiots

Wednesday, January 05, 2011

Tonight at 7:00 Eastern on ESPN is the 2011 Under Armour All-American Game. The game features head coaches Mike Ditka and Steve Mariucci, and Notre Dame verbals DaVaris Daniels and Ben Koyack. So if you can tolerate the ridiculous uniforms and even more ridiculous team names (Team Micro-G vs Team Click Clack), be sure to check it out.